The Maids

Jean Genet receives an unbridled, expertly cinematic rendering in this adaptation of his perverse play. Glenda Jackson and Susannah York play Solange and Claire, Paris maids who tend to the unending domestic needs of cruel socialite Madame (Vivien Merchant). Whenever Madame is away, the sisters obsessively act out a complex role-playing psychodrama of domination and control that feeds their powerful lust for revenge upon their haughty, disdainful mistress. Director Christopher Miles and cinematographer Douglas Slocombe focus Genet’s heady theatricality into a riveting and dynamic cinematic experience. In a world where the lines between mistress and servant, confession and accusation, degradation and redemption, and murder and suicide become as fragile as French lace, the fatal truth remains that, “naturally, maids are guilty when madams are innocent.”